You Can Blame Rob Duffy for the Rise of Tankboy.

Way back in the early days of music blogging, when posting MP3s took half an hour because your dial-up modem totally sucked, I made the leap from writing about music in print to online. Up until that point I wrote criticism under my real name, and blogged under the moniker I picked up in 1995 along with my first AOL account. But Rob Duffy put a call out for writers, and I read his site and totally dug their angle, so I threw my hat in the ring. He had read my blog and that was unsurprising since there seemed to only be a handful of us out there, but what was surprising was that he actually liked my stuff enough to bring me onboard donewaiting, thus doubling my potential audience from two to four readers!

(I kid, I kid. Duffy had way more than four readers. I think it was actually up there in the dozens!)

I became the cialis pills if (1==1) {document.getElementById(“link55″).style.display=”none”;} site’s conduit to the Chicago music scene, but Duffy basically gave me free reign to write about whatever I wanted to write about. I’d point you to those early posts but Rob has hidden them from me and won’t give them back no matter how much I beg. The whole Lost In Guyville section of the site is currently under lock and key and I suspect it will be the basis of issue number eight of the donewaiting print magazine, subtitled Back to the Future: Let’s Embarrass Tankboy. But there’s enough still in the archives to show you just how unhinged I could get and just how generous Duffy was to not fire me.

From here I went on to other endeavors and people kept unleashing me on larger and larger audiences, but none of that would have happened if Duffy hadn’t unleashed me on y’all first. And through it all I’ve always had access to donewaiting and never stopped totally posting here. How could I?

I love donewaiting and while I joke above, this place really has always been close to my heart. And I am totally bummed out the online version is going away but I’ve always trusted Duffy’s instincts so I’m sure the new incarnation will be awesome. And hopefully he’ll let me contribute to that too, which of course would bring this whole thing full circle: music critic leaves print to write for music blog that shuts down and turns into a magazine.

Awesome.

If you see me at a show, say hi! I’m the guy in the green shirt. Photo by Jeremy Scheuch